Walled Cities and Wasteland
Improvisational Session at Emory
University
Religion,
Cognition, and Praxis Working Group
Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 12 pm – 2 pm
6 partipicants: faculty of Emory University.
Topics suggested: fishing, humor, love and
peace, the poetics of disputation, wasteland, walled cities. Chosen: walled
cities and wasteland.
Duration of writing: 30 min. Duration of session: 2 hours
Left to
right: Montgomery, Goodstein, Martin, Reed, Queen
Left to right: Epstein, Goodstein,
Martin, Reed, Queen
Texts (in the order of readings):
1. Elizabeth S. Goodstein, ILA
No City, No Walls
This topic turns out to
be haunted by another writing—that is to say, by places that I intended
to escape or at least evade here. RavensbrŸck is the name that has, once again,
hauled me back inside, but one could also say Oświęcim
or Bergen Belsen, Belzec or the outskirts of Riga. Here one might mention the
walls of Rome that haunted FreudÕs dreams and yielded the fertile figure of a
subjectivity layered in time, strewn with the detritus of its former
boundaries, invisibly sealed in by the past.
What makes the memorial
impossible is the failure of the walls to contain the camps. At one edge of
what was once the boundary: the crematorium, the wall of nations, the row of
memorials, the podium and the lake. But on the other extreme, fading into the
woods, a blurry boundary dotted with barracks, falling-down fences, the traces
of the Russian occupation. The signs warning against the possibility of
munitions. Everywhere rusting metal, decomposing concrete, defunct train
tracks, hagebutte bushes.
Circles within circles;
the woods contain and do not contain the wasteland; the wasteland contains and
does not contain the camp; the memorial is site-less. A place of movement and
stultification. The encircling train line surrounds a rabbit warren of traces
of multiple nests of death. Uckermark, Siemens, the mensÕs camp, the tent. The
tents. Where they brought the Reichsjuden near the end. The women who had come back
from the east who later declared RavensbrŸck worse than Auschwitz. Like all
such testimonies stopping the mind in its tracks.
And so today, here, once
again the difficulty that RavensbrŸck has come to name: that there is no space
outside the camp. The memorialÕs boundaries are clear enough, if blurred, like Rome,
with its different temporal layers. Yet on the nominal outside RavensbrŸck is
not at an end: the SS settlement, the villas that encircle the hillside beyond
the walls—still beyond, the circles of industrial courtyards, barracks,
more train tracksÉuntil the woods intersect with what is still the nominal
outside world. And so this implosion, the unclarity marked on the one hand by
the layers of time and on the other by the fact that in the face of this
endless intermingling of wasteland and crumbling walls, I at least can no
longer find a way to situate myself outside.
* * * * *
2. Edward
L. Queen, The Center for Ethics
The Siege:
The Wasteland Inside and Outside the Walls
Walled cities—old,
enclosed, separated, my two favorite places in the world—Dubrovnik and
Jerusalem—surrounded by wall, old and historical, small lines going up
and down, the play of shadow and light—yet so different. To me, Dubrovnik
remains a city of fun—abutting the Adriatic, filled with cafes and bars.
The CafŽ Troubadour small and cramped, where jazz greats have wandered in and
the owner calls me ÒChicagoÓ due to my fondness for My Kind of Town.
JerusalemÕs pleasures are
different. My daughter calls it Òdirty, smelly, and old.Ó The BaedekerÕs for 1898 pointedly remark
that Jerusalem is not city for fun. Yet it remains a place of pleasure for
me—religious site abutting religious site. History so deep that it
jades—something merely 400 years old is barely worth noting. Its lanes
and byways move me in ways that I barely can articulate.
Despite these pleasures
both cities come with anguish—sieged and besieged.
I arrived in Dubrovnik
the first time amidst the war. The siege only recently had been lifted. The
ride in from the airport revealed a wasteland of pillaged farms and burned and
shell-pocked buildings. Indeed the airport itself stood as a half-ravaged
land—one landing strip, no radar, and the recently besieging army only
twelve kilometers in the distance.
The sights astounded and
dismayed. Where had the people gone? Had they survived? What had been wasted in
this land? Animals, crops, human lives? And what about Dubrovnik itself, Ragusa
of old? An ancient republic, which, as many told me, had been the first country
to recognize the United States as a free and independent country. The city
itself, never giving in to the attempt by others to turn it into a wasteland,
for as one entered its gates one was reminded by signs in English, French,
Italian, German, and Croatian decrying the ÒSerbian and MontenegrinÓ aggression
and pinpointing where every shell had hit with a color-coded notice of the
damage.
Besieged for a year, its
citizens huddled in the old pesthouse—the quarantine station that
hearkened back to the days of Ragusan glory when it rivaled Venice as a trading
power. In those days, to save itself, Dubrovnik locked away those would enter,
preserving the health of its citizens and keeping itself from becoming a
wasteland, a place of pestilence and death. And once again, in the twentieth
century—the pesthouse saved the people. Yet this time they locked
themselves away as others struggled to waste it.
The reminders so visible.
The fountain on the stradun, as much
a symbol of DubrovnikÕs glory as its walls, still in ruins from a direct rocket
hit, the streets of the stradum
itself scarred by shells, and the walls, the walls of the city, the source of
its identity and security, revealed the level of destruction of collapsed
roofs.
Yet the city
lived—cold, traumatized, shaken—resilient and reviving. Lovers
walked its lanes, farmers sold homemade slivovitz
in old, Fanta bottles, offering a sample to the passerby, the astringent liquor
poured into the bottleÕs screw-on cap. Destruction and death beside life and
vitality but the wasteland lurked on the road and in peopleÕs minds.
Their minds—one
must always wonder about peopleÕs minds. ÒWhat are they thinking?Õ ÒWhat could
they be thinking?Ó In Jerusalem above all cities, I do not see how one ever
could escape that question. The city itself, by all accounts, has been besieged
and destroyed more times than any living city. Like Carthage it has been razed
and sown with salt, yet unlike the home of Hannibal it has arisen again and yet
again. A city of religion and life, but also of waste in so many forms. Just
outside the walls lays the valley of Gehinnom—Gehenna. The source of our hell, where
the worshippers of Moloch sacrificed their children before the fire of the
horrible god and which for centuries remained a wasteland of garbage, filth,
and burning.
Destruction and death, as
conqueror after conqueror breached its walls—but the wastelands inside
and outside the city are even more complex and insidious. Beside the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre lay for many years a tanning yard—a wastelamnd of muck
and stench as Ottoman overlords expressed their disgust with the putrefaction
of Christianity. And for centuries before the that time the cityÕs Christian
rulers, the purported heirs of the Romans who had destroyed the city in 70 c.e.
and again in 135, had left the Temple Mount a wasteland—a dung heap—a
statement of their feelings for a people and religion that in their mind was
superseded.
* * *
* *
3. Mikhail Epstein, REALC
The Wall Street: was it too thickly walled?
My first association with
"walled cities" points to the Wall Street in New York. This name
originates in the historical setting of the city, as a reference to a wall that
was erected by Dutch settlers on the southern tip of Manhattan Island in the
17th century, during their war
with English settlers. This wall was never used for the intended
purpose. Instead, in the late 18th century, the street became the site for the
New York Stock Exchange and rapidly grew into the heart of the world finances.
Thus, centuries after the wall's removal, the name of the Wall Street remained
a metaphorical testimony on the walls that indeed separate the financial heart
of the world from it globally stretched body.
What is going now under
the name of the "global economic crisis" can be described
by a medical metaphor which involves both images of the wall and the
heart. It is known that the
heart wall thickening is linked to the stroke danger, to the loss of brain
functions due to a disturbance in the blood supply. The walls of the Wall
Street turned out to be too thick, which may be the cause of a rapid and
uncontrollable loss of blood and the global financial hemorrhage.
Geographical, medical and
financial realities are metaphorical in relation to each other, but all of them
are parts of the same reality, and everything is in everything, as Anaxagoras
postulated. When a metaphor begins to work independently from the source area
in the target area and acquires a force of explanation, this is not merely a
metaphor any more, but a logical device, called by Charles Pierce an abduction,
in distinction from the more trivial deduction and induction. An image is
abducted from one area to serve its duty within another. We observe everywhere,
not only in human anatomy, that the thickness of walls increases the risk of
hemmorage.
This can be further illustrated
by the fate of the Soviet Union. "Kremlin" (from "krem," a
city wall, a walled place) is Russian for "fortress,"
"citadel" or "castle." The Moscow Kremlin is a walled heart
of the largest geopolitical bodyon the earth. What happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union was
precisely the hemmorage of the superpower caused by the thickening of its heart
walls, the isolation of the ruling heart from the rest of the country, which
gradually grew into wastelandÉ
* * *
* *
4. David W. Montgomery, Religion
Trash
I lived in the Naryn
Mountains, in a building that had been given little attention since being built
thirty years earlier. Those who built here had little concern for the
aesthetics of place. One was only to live in the generic structures, finding
there utility greater than that of traditional structures, yurtas which have no
corners. The apartment was comfort when the mountains were mean, but
disconcerting when they were majestic. Ten minutes outside of town was the
cemetery, a reminder of entry and departure. Ten minutes further, on foot and
into what seemed greater remoteness, deeper into the mountainÕs belly, was the
trash dump, home to stray dogs, rats, and plastic bags from China. Once nature,
now a simmering history of refuse, it was a place outside of the city, where
the most unfortunate foraged to find food and the more fortunate sought to
deny. The dust storms of the Taklimakan Desert—for which Chinese nuclear
tests were often blamed—would often return the trash to the streets from
which it came. People got better at making trash, using less efficiently, more
conveniently, and equally displacing the blame for cleanliness, for the
responsibility of trash on others. Diffusing responsibility to others, and as
the trash accumulated the street sweepers are never looked at, only blamed for
not doing enough.
Each neighborhood has a
place where trash goes, consisting of three concrete sides and trash goes only
approximately in it. And more and more, approximately in it seems to be enough.
Approximately, and you can disregard it.
People are treated the
same. What do we do with walls that place rubbish beyond our viewsÉ place must
have place so it can be seen as outside place. It seems too easy to do the same
with people. And too often we doÉ when my neighbors lived in yurtas, they had
less trash.
* * *
* *
5. Walter Reed, ILA, English
The Dialectic of Muralization and Devastation
In the Hebrew Bible,
also known, mutatis mutandis, as the
Old Testament, there seem to be two places or spaces of prime importance: the city (which is usually a city
defined and defended by surrounding walls) and the desert (which is usually
understood as a wasteland, a space you want to pass through rather than a place
to establish permanent residence—even if it takes you 40 years).
But in a more
general philosophical perspective, the idea of an urbs or metropolis seems to generate (or be generated by—a
chicken and egg problem that I leave to those who find causality important) the
idea of the country, the boondocks, the empty, boring places deprived of
civilization and modernity.
(I had intended to
begin this improvisation—my contribution to the collective
improvisation—with ÒSomething there is that doesnÕt love a wall,Ó from
FrostÕs meditation on fences and neighborliness—but . . . maybe I can
still work it in: ÒSomething there
is that canÕt live without a walled city and canÕt live within I either.Ó In fact—loving as I do great
generalizations about areas of knowledge where I remain outside the walls of
expertise rather than within the gates of the discipline—both the
Testaments, Old and New, are rather ambivalent about walled cities. The Hebrew people became enslaved to
the urban ambitions of a Pharaoh Òwho did not remember Joseph.Ó Yes, Jerusalem is much desired and
celebrated, but no, when the chosen people choose to put their faith in the
protection of its walls rather than in the protection of the God who has
plucked them out from among the nations, itÕs off to Babylon, the bad city of
the evil empire. And simply to
mention the Book of Revelation, with its bad earthly Babylon falling, falling,
falling and its good new Jerusalem coming down from heaven, should be
sufficient.
IÕm in the midst of
reading a book written by a rat who finds himself in the midst of a wonderful
used book store in a part of Boston, Scollay Square, thatÕs terribly run down
and is slated for urban renewal—I think itÕs set in the early Ô60s. I have a feeling I know whatÕs going to
happen: the wasteland within the
city (a city of walls for the narrator-hero, Firman, certainly) which is a
paradise for rats, is going to be laid waste, covered over with concrete so
that it can become a space worthy of the new urbanites, the better class of
people who keep insisting that the walls, physical and social, between them and
the less fortunate or talented members of the human race—be made more
secure. All cites aspire to the
condition of gated communities, though they also are quite unstable as such.
I was born on 5th
Avenue in New York City, capitol of modernity. I have lived, been drawn (sometimes kicking and screaming)
to the wastelands, high-culturally speaking, of small towns, beyond the pale of
civilization as I dreamt of knowing it.
ÒWhen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,Ó asserts Dr.
Johnson. And yet, and yet—I
wonder if being within the gates or without the gates makes a
difference—makes as much of
difference, as the dialectic of muralization and devastation, the
apparently endless interplay of building up dividing demarcations and tearing
them down, is really where itÕs at, so to speak. Maybe the inner city lion will lie down with the lamb of the
open fields, but probably only when we re-imagine the dialectic—the war
of oppositions—as an ecosystem, a peaceful though by no means restful or
sedentary, accommodation.
ÒTill
we have built Jerusalem
In EnglandÕs green and pleasant land.Ó
Or GeorgiaÕs. Or
AmericaÕs. Or EmoryÕs. Or this fragile earth our island homeÕs.
(IÕll bet you
thought I couldnÕt sneak the topic of love and peace—charis and shalom—the one we passed
over—in here. It never
occurred to me that I could either.)